


À Connaître

by LouRea (MementoVitae)



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Face-Sitting, Finger Sucking, Friends With Benefits, Mouth Kink, Pegging, Porn with Feelings, Post-Devil May Cry 5, Touch-Starved, We can't let people know we yearn, an exceptionally tender reach around
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:07:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25777126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MementoVitae/pseuds/LouRea
Summary: "She promised him a place he would always belong, and he promised her that she wouldn't be forgotten."Sequential one-offs about two liminal beings fucking the loneliness and existential dread away, no strings attached.Spoiler: There are so many strings attached.
Relationships: Lucia/V (Devil May Cry)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There’s whole other long fic that leads up to this, but I physically couldn’t hold this in anymore so *drains shot glass and smashes it on the floor* baby's first E fic, here we go.

The lock clicks, but several minutes pass where the door doesn’t open. Lucia is giggling too much. V is half irritated and half suppressing his own amusement and they’re falling against one another in a vain effort to not double over, both overestimating the other’s ability to stay upright. The door finally opens when they both sag against it. He’s not even sure what they’re laughing about.

It's possible they have gotten drunker since leaving the bar.

Shadow emerges, chuffing and butting energetically into Lucia’s thighs until she provides attention in the form of scratched ears and squished cheeks. “ _Mon petit chat domestique!_ You are as spoiled as I remember.”

V glides on liquid steps to open the nearest window. Griffon disperses into the night with a flutter and a cheeky encouragement that doesn’t quite make it through the alcohol haze. Not until it’s too late to do anything but scowl at his disappearing shape. 

_Water_ , he thinks with dizzy determination. He hasn’t seen her in so long. Meeting her by chance and getting a little too drunk on her company (and an already-blurred list of drinks) has made a bright spot of his evening, but he would like to be sober enough to appreciate the rest of it while it lasts.

It may be another year before they see each other again, after all.

She tips her cup in an automatic toast when he hands it to her. It looks terrible because it’s a dingy little thrift shop mug painted with a fat blue chick that reminds him of Griffon. But it’s enough to pull a crooked grin from him.

“As out of place as ever,” he murmurs.

“You hand me a cup like this when the rest of your house is nothing but evidence of your rich tastes and then call me out of place?” She clicks her tongue at him, but her eyes are warm in the dim light coming in off the street. “I think you like things that are out of place.”

The sharp sensation of cold cuts through the buzz as he drains his own significantly less silly glass. Enough for him to flick on the lights, at least. “I like what I like without worrying if it matches its surroundings.”

“Then you would display this mug?” she asks. “Out in the open?”

The glint of challenge in her eyes doesn’t go unnoticed. “If I liked it enough.”

“You like it enough to have it, surely that is enough.”

With a self-satisfied smile, she sits it on a low shelf right next to his African violets. It looks just as terrible there as it did when she toasted with it, but somehow he can’t hate it while she’s standing beside it looking like she just beat him in an arm-wrestling contest.

He rolls his eyes anyway and shuffles back to the kitchen. “Charming.”

“I am.”

She is.

In the time it takes for him to drop his cup in the sink, she kicks off her boots and disappears into his bedroom. He finds her sprawled across his jumbled sheets, sinking in with languor that could put Shadow to shame.

“How I’ve missed this bed,” she sighs. “I have to get one like it to Vie de Marli.”

“Oh?” He swerves around her shins where they jut off the mattress and sits beside her, raising a playful brow. “Still looking forward to my next visit that much?”

She squints at him from the corner of her eye. “I meant for me, not you, arrogant mule’s ass. And who are you to sound so smug? You bought me a drink so quickly I barely had time to sit!”

He shrugged. “I drink there every night. It’s noticeable when someone new comes in.”

“Every night? In that den of iniquity? You? If I did not know you better I might be tempted to think you drink there simply because I liked it there.” She rolls onto her side like a basking cat, with a knowing, wicked chuckle. “Perhaps you hope a lovely stranger will come into town and meet you.”

He opens his mouth, but it takes a second longer than it should for him to answer. “I drink there because it’s a devil hunter’s bar.”

There is no return fire. Drunk or not, his pause has not gone unnoticed. She reaches up and gently brushes his hair back from his face with the cool, calloused tips of her fingers.

“Will it kill you if you admit that you missed me, _merle_?”

Loneliness crashes over him in a merciless wave. Drags him out into depths of comfort and mutual understanding that make his throat clench even as he strives to drown in it. No one has called him that in a year, nor given him any of what that pet name represents.

He relaxes down, slowly enough (he hopes) to conceal how starved he is for the haven that is knowing that he can touch her and let himself be touched by her. She’s dressed for business rather than leisure, but that leaves a familiar swath open over the well-shaped muscles at her lower back. His thumbs rub in lazy circles over her exposed skin as rests his face in the bend between her shoulder and neck breathes her in. She still smells like ocean air from the boat trip to the mainland and it mingles with the bittersweetness of chocolate wine on her breath to send a dozen tipsy thoughts of saltwater taffy through his mind. He fiddles with the golden tie at the end of her braid until it comes free. Beneath him, she gives a low, relaxed rumble as he tangles his fingers through her hair until it falls in loose waves over her shoulders.

He has missed her. So much more than he thought he’d be capable of.

“I did give you my word I would not forget you, songbird.”

Her laugh is reserved but pleased. She only laughs like that when she’s more flattered than she wants to admit. “It seems your silver tongue remains untarnished.”

His tongue slides along his lower lip. The reaction is practically Pavlovian after all the previous instances she has used some variation of that phrase. All of which are rushing to the front of his mind with breath-stealing clarity. By design, he’s sure. Even before his eyes refocus, he notices she is staring at him from beneath her lashes in a way that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

It’s been a long time since he let anyone touch him, much less anyone he trusted. He finds it easier than usual. With anyone else, it would be a matter of making them work for it to let them undress him. With her, the eager way she strips him touches something much deeper than ego. There’s no part of him he wants or needs to hide from her. She pursues his body already knowing what it is and what it means and to be wanted in spite of that is like having raw electricity poured through his veins. To the point that the seconds she spends pulling his belt out from its loops and working his cock free are spent holding his breath and it only releases in a shuddering groan when she plants a kiss along the half-hard length.

There’s something gratifying and terrifying about being so comfortable with her after so long, but he can hardly put words to what it is. Not when she’s up and undressing and he’s light-headed with anticipation.

When she sits at the edge of the bed, tosses her hair back over her broad shoulders, and gestures to the floor in front of her, he bends rather than kneels. Just low enough to run his nails up her thighs. “You’ve grown haughty, Lucia.”

“Have I.” Not a question, and he couldn’t have answered it anyway. She’s running both hands through his hair, gathering it back in her fist, and his mouth is suddenly dry.

His fingertips have reached high enough to fret at the hem of her underwear. He seems to recall she likes the implication of impatience in keeping them on and working around them. Something she initially thought they had in common before realizing that he simply didn’t like being fully unclothed. With her sitting otherwise naked but cool as a queen on his bed, he has more than enough real impatience to spare.

He leans into her, letting his mouth remember the lines and dips of her neck, the curves of her breasts and the subtle ripples of muscles beneath the pliant skin of her stomach. She makes a low, appreciative noise and shifts closer toward the edge of the bed as he nips below her navel, and he eagerly bows to let the weight of her thighs rest on his shoulders. Up close, her panties are pale, spidery thin, and certainly not for business. He sucks teasingly at the fabric. Feels the tickle of a few wiry red curls against his lips and catches the muted taste of her.

“These don’t seem to be for demon hunting…” His voice drips with conceit and not a lick of shame about it is in eyes when the flick up to hers. “Perhaps you hoped a lovely stranger would meet you after you came into town?”

Her fist tightens in his hair, making his eyes flutter and lips part. “I’m beginning to wonder why I missed that troublesome mouth of yours.”

“So you’ve missed it,” he says, watching her beneath his hooded eyes as he tugs the fabric aside. “Or would you like to walk that back?”

She’s in the middle of saying something—calling him a son of a bitch, he hopes—but whatever it is disintegrates as he curls his tongue against her cunt.

He almost disintegrates with her. Maybe his cock has a better memory than he does or maybe it’s her scent and her heat and the familiar slickness that quickly coats his mouth, but the déjà vu is blade-sharp. Suddenly, he finds himself missing things he had nearly forgotten about. 

Like the way her bright voice deepens to a near baritone when she moans, reverberating so low in her belly that he tastes thunder as he sucks at her clit. The half-mewled of curses in English and French and, when he slips one and then another finger inside of her and _curls_ , Creole. The way she hisses when he pauses to sink his teeth into her thigh, and the way she only lets him make her wait like that for a few seconds before she’s pulling him back where she needs him.

She’s beautifully noisy. He’s never forgotten that.

Or the way her responses change from vocal to physical as she gets closer. Her thighs slip against his shoulders like she’s trying to shift her weight, and her goosebumps recede and give way to a sheen of sweat that leaves his fingers digging in just to keep his grip on her. The uncanny depth of her voice pinwheels in the other direction, high and needy and crystalline. In the past, he’d have stopped to tease her at this point, but he’s missed her, he’s missed her everything and the game of making her beg is unimportant compared to satisfying her.

He’d thought it a bit unfortunate that she hadn’t opted to ride his face but the way she moves, it hardly matters. She bucks with the same potent mix of abandonment and concentrated intent as ever, pulling him closer by his hair until it’s all he can do to suck open-mouthed at her clit while she grinds and ruts through wave after wave after wave.

Listening to her come is like listening to her sing. All quick, sharp breaths between broken but melodious howls.

When her fist loosens and his dark hair tumbles back into his face, he knows she’s done. And knows that she’s _really_ done when she bats limply at his forehead and squirms back from the slow, grazing circles he keeps tracing with his tongue.

“So…” he purrs, thumbing away the mess left on his swollen lips and licking his fingers clean. “Is this devil’s tongue still silver?”

She laughs and rubs at his scalp, idly soothing the places she worries she might have gripped too tightly. “Mmhm… sterling.”

He rests his head against her thigh and closes his eyes. Content for the moment to ignore the pre-cum trailing down his cock in favor of the high praise of her hollowed, satisfied voice, and idle touch.

Soon her breaths are steady, and he can no longer feel her pulse fluttering under his cheek. She lets out a breath and shifts until she is properly on the bed, patting the space beside her like he’s a cat she can just summon wherever she wants.

Maybe he is because he climbs in right beside her.

“How obedient.” There’s a hint of approval in her voice. Just enough to ignite a trail of gunpowder in his chest that ends at his cock. Or maybe it’s the other way around. “Has your mouth grown tired?”

“Is that your way of saying you’d like me to polish my tongue on you a second time?”

“Could you?”

She spirals a finger around one of his nipples, following the pattern of his remaining tattoos, and his head swims. He glares at her breasts like the traitors they are. If there was any justice in the world at all, her nipples would be as sensitive as his own and he would give her a taste of her own medicine.

“Do not underestimate me.”

She pinches gently, and his cock jumps seemingly in time with his low yelp. “Never, _merle._ ”

Shivering, he arches into the flick of her thumbs against the pink spots of his nipples and soon into the heat of her mouth closing around his cock. A strangled grunt fights through his teeth as she laps up the mess of pre-cum spilled along the length.

He will absolutely not last and that’s unfair and unbearable; it’s been so, so long.

“Lucia-ah, wait—wait.” She looks up at him with her mouth still wrapped around the head of his cock and he’s certain for a second he’s going to come or die or both. “I have…a proposition.”

She sits up properly with bright eyes. She loves new things, especially when he asks for them. He hopes, as he reaches under the bed and lifts out a nondescript black box, that she will like this too.

She opens the box with the smug glee of someone who already knows what to expect. She blinks. The glee vanishes. It _isn’t_ what she expects, and while there isn’t any obvious revulsion on her face, he unconsciously tenses up as she lifts the contraption up between them.

“A strap-on?” she asks eventually.

Of course she knows what it is. “Yes.”

“I do not intend to judge, but I am surprised you would have something like this. You don’t seem the type.”

‘To let a fling use something like this on you’ is the rest of that thought, and she is right.

“It’s a relic from diving too early into the deep end.” His eyes roll toward the ceiling, turning inward with the hot and cold memory of getting in far over his head. “When Nicoletta Goldstein deigns to bed a man, she tops.”

Lucia sucks in her lips to keep from laughing. She’s only met Nico a handful of times that he knows of, but it only takes meeting Nico once to know she’s the kind of woman for whom bringing a strap-on to a one-night stand is perfectly in character.

She lets the strap-on drop to her lap. Her fingers drift across the silicone attachment, eliciting a quite different kind of tension low in his stomach. “You liked it then?”

“I didn’t… hate it.” His pride had suffered for weeks, but somehow he doesn’t expect that to be a problem this time. “In many regards, I was simply not prepared to handle someone like Nico.”

“But you think you can handle me? You do know I’m stronger than Nico.”

His eyes run a fiery marathon along the sinuous curves of her arms and down to her thighs, which he knows from experience could probably kill him. He swallows. “I am aware of that, yes.”

“Did you…” She struggles with the wording, as she often does when she is trying to be mindful of his peculiarities. “I assume you weren’t naked with Nico?”

“No.”

“I see. Should I let you…?”

“No.” He lowers his eyes. “I don’t think I’ll need it.”

Answering doesn’t bother him. It’s the way she sees what it means that is far too much for him to look at. The way she smiles like he’s handed her something important. He has—but it’s almost panic-inducing that she knows that.

She leans in and kisses him before he realizes it. Soft and bordering on chaste, but he flinches back from it anyway. “ ** _Lucia._** ”

“Oh? Does the rule hold after you shamelessly kissed me in broad daylight?”

“That was special. A goodbye gesture.” He glances up at her to catch her badly hiding a grin. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says, cracking with innocent laughter that he knows is not at his expense. “You are such a dry man; your sense of romance always surprises me. But I should not have assumed. _Padonem, padonem._ ”

He grumbles, but they both know it’s just him settling back down from the faux pas. “Just take my goddamn pants off, woman.”

It wasn’t planned, but it is either very good or very bad that he got Lucia off first. On the upside, she’s attentive and relaxed and that takes the edge off of the whole thing. On the downside(?) she is watching him with the lazy confidence of a recently fed tiger, already sated, and so automatically in control. She feels around inside of him like she’s exploring the gap of where a tooth used to be. Trying to build a map from what her fingers tell her. It would be catastrophically unsexy if she was not also so attentively pursuing the source of ever slight whimper or roll of his hips.

He thinks he’d curse her name if he had the breath, but that’s a lie. She’s trying and that’s its own reward. As is the sight of her casually wearing that contraption.

“My eyes are up here,” she says offhand.

“You’ve never looked in my eyes while I had any part of me inside you, Lucia.”

“I look—” She averts her eyes and smiled crookedly. “At your face.”

“You look at my mouth.”

She sighs dreamily. “Your lips are nearly as intriguing as your tongue.”

He makes a show of biting his lower lip, and it gets an honest to god shudder out of her. With a reaction like that he’s _almost_ tempted to let her kiss him. Before he can get too complacent about it, she retaliates by sinking a third finger into him.

“Menace,” he hisses.

“Says the pot to the kettle.” She flexes her fingers inside him and glances uncertainly at the dildo. “Think you’re ready?”

He makes a faint sound of assent and focuses on not second-guessing this decision. Outside his periphery, there’s a snap of lube opening and closing and most likely she’s using too much but he doesn’t think he can look. She lines the tip up with him and with barely a second’s hesitation, presses in until he’s so full he can barely speak.

“Amazing,” she says, with honest marvel. “You really took the whole thing.”

She pauses and tilts her head and for one horrible moment, it seems like she doesn’t know what to do. Then she pulls back and thrusts again, every bit as agonizingly as she did with her fingers, and he moans horribly. She’s watching him. Listening to him. 

Nico had taken him from behind, fucking him like a dog and damn near throwing his back out in the process. Lucia pulls him closer until his lower back rests on her thighs and lifts his legs until his knees are thrown over her shoulders. Somehow it’s wildly more embarrassing, but any protests he can think of conveniently disappear the moment she leans down over him. There’s a fog over her eyes, darkening them to a stormy shade of green that matches his own.

“You look…good like this.”

He makes a hollow wheeze like he’s just been punched, and that trail of gunpowder ignites fresh. Burning down through his stomach and ending in another fat drop of precum that beads and slips and falls to his skin. Fingers skitter across the sheets, gripping for purchase solid enough to keep him grounded only to end up gripping the edge of his headboard.

Lucia’s hand touches his cheek and he leans into it hungrily. It feels good, it feels so good to be malleable, to let her be bold with his body. Her thumb brushes his lips. He parts them invitingly, running his tongue along the rough pad of her finger. In time with her thrust, she plunges it into his mouth, and his moan comes out as messy noise as he tries to suck around it.

“Uh uh,” she tuts breathily, and tugs at his cheek “Open. Open your mouth, V.”

He hesitates. “Ha—ahn…?”

“Yes, just, _fuck_ …!” That’s all it takes. Her free hand drops to his hip, holding him in place as her pace grows bolder. Quicker. “Just like that.”

He groans, high and desperate. Anything. Anything she asks. Anything she wants, if it makes her talk to him like that. Look at him like that. If it makes her fuck him with the ruthless urgency he needs.

With her thumb pressing down on his tongue, all the sound he makes comes out deafening. Every time he tries to bite down on it, she chides him, and every time he obediently opens his mouth back up for her she croons ‘ _like that, just like that, that’s perfect’_ , her near-reverential tone shooting through him with such white-hot intensity that his body turns to static and he momentarily forgets he exists and that she isn’t done with him.

Saliva runs down his chin and her wrist and drips cold onto his chest. He cannot imagine how he looks, but her eyes on him are molten. Her name rushes garbled and half-pronounced from his throat over and over.

“Are you begging, _merle_?”

“Ah…hah..!”

It takes him so much longer than it should for him to remember that there is more to his body than his mouth and the all-consuming ache between his thighs. That he can still nod and that it means something.

“Anything,” she sighs, lowering her thumb to skim across his lips. “Ask me, and it’s yours.”

“Please,” he keens, desperate for her approval even more so than her permission. “Please _—_ Lucia, fuck me. Let me come, I can’t—I need—”

Her thumb digs back into his mouth and cuts him off. “ _Montrez moi_.”

He remembers not-enough of her languages. But just like _‘merle’_ he can never forget the meaning of those words. The context of how many times she has said them to him before on the very edge of orgasm is burned in.

_Show me._

He replaces her rhythm with his own more frantic one, forgetting himself to cry out as she easily compliments his furious but clumsy bucking with the steady strength of her countering thrusts. His body goes tight beneath her. Stretches sinuously, once, to a tumbling stream of pleading syllables that might or might not be real worlds. His hips stutter, but hers don’t, and he must have run out of breath because he can hear nothing but the wet, frenzied slap of her skin against his.

It all implodes at once.

He clutches helplessly at the headboard as his body trembles and twists. He comes in rivulets that paint a trail from his cheek down to his navel over and over and over again. It's agony and it’s divine and the whole room seems to throb in time with his body and with his groans, so guttural they are nearly sobs.

Her voice acts as a tether for him. Back into the grounded warmth of her touch. Her closeness. She’s humming, and her fingers are still against his cheek. His lashes flutter as he tries to focus on her.

“Good…?” he mumbles.

The humming ends and she gives a slow and easy laugh. “I should be asking you that.”

“…Can’t feel my legs.”

She lowers him back down to the bed and eases the toy out of him with painstaking care that still elicits a shudder and hiss from him. Then it’s over, and he’s empty, and even though he hears padding across his floor and his bathroom sink running, she feels awfully far away. Even when she comes back, and he feels the warmth of a wet cloth cleaning up the mess. Even when she asks, “Is there anything else you need?”

 _When did I get so…_ The first word that comes to his mind is ‘needy’, but a much smaller and more somber voice provides ‘lonely’. That’s probably accurate, but he’s always been alone anyway.

So why does it both him so much now?

“No.”

He senses this is a lie but he’s not really sure what the truth is. Or that he’d be able to say it if he did know. So he lifts the sheets and makes a vague patting motion that earns another low laugh before she climbs into bed beside him. Unabashedly, she pulls him close to her, and again that tide drags at him. Beckons him into deeper waters that promise safety and compassion, if not love. She isn’t his and he isn’t hers; that’s not the nature of this arrangement. But he can belong with her if he lets himself have that much during the brief moments they meet.

This time he lets himself drown.

* * *

In the morning, she slips away. As she always does. Not sneaking, because she has no reason to, but with a feather lightness that doesn’t manage to stir him from the nest of her scent she has made of his bed. Her presence, even after a year, is familiar enough to him that he doesn’t feel any need to be on the alert with someone else casually roaming his space.

She leans down and plants a kiss at the corner of his mouth that he barely registers and cannot summon any energy to grumble over.

“A goodbye gesture,” she whispers. “Until next time, _merle_.”

Later that morning, while staring at the silly, out of place mug next to his flowers, he struggles to remember if the way he croaked ‘ _Stay…_ ’ was real and reached her, or if it was just something he dreamed.

He puts the thought quickly out of mind and lets the cup stay exactly where she left it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You thought there were a lot of feelings in V's chapter?
> 
> Ha. You are like a little baby. Watch this.

The canal is one of the quietest places on Lucia’s evening route no matter the season. It’s normal that her only company is her footsteps or the occasional song when the mood takes her. Heavy snowfall silences both, and muffles even natural sounds of Dumary, like the wind and the distant whisper of the waves on the shore.

So, though it’s distant, she hears it clearly: the notes of a piano weaving on the wind.

There’s an antique charm to the sound. The kind only an old gramophone paired with old record could produce. Any number of such things can be found on Dumary, but no one from Dumary would play music so loudly at this hour. Not without the kind of celebration that would see a dozen voices raised.

A traveler has arrived, and they are making a loud effort to get someone’s attention.

Hers.

Excitement sparks like a struck match as she steps off the canal to follow the music. To the same cobblestone alley under the same narrow balconette three stories up where she has perched before. Dust and darkness have been the only inhabitants for nearly two years, but tonight there is a glow in the window and the wistful and endlessly lovely sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice from within.

_The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations_

_Silk stockings thrown aside, dance invitations_

_Oh, how the ghost of you clings_

_These foolish things remind me of you_

When she lands she finds the window is open, and V inside as though he never left, cross-legged with his eyes steady on some new book in his lap.

“How strange to have a songbird come to my window in the middle of winter.”

“Stranger to find an open window in this snow.”

The book closes with a soft thump and V climbs out of the comfortable plushness of the old chair. Something’s odd about his movement, but she can’t pin down what it is before he’s standing right in front of her. Close enough for her to catch a scent she remembers from his home back in Redgrave. Juniper, rosemary, and elderflower linger on his clothes and stain her senses like a drop of violet ink against the crisp, clear nothingness of the snow. He circles both arms around her waist and she freezes on the spot, bewildered by the hug-like motion even though there’s no way in hell he would ever.

Behind her, the window clicks shut.

The back of her legs tingle with the sudden lack of cold. Snow melts and drips from her coat onto the floor in a light patter. All of these are small and far away details compared to the way V is looking at her and the warmth of his breath on her face.

“Better?” he whispers.

Her eyes narrow and her tongue runs slowly over her teeth. He’d been on the more vulnerable side last they met. Some combination, she thinks, of alcohol and absence. Right now, he’s more as she remembers him.

Insufferable and insufferably attractive.

“A start. Getting comfortable might also be an improvement.” She arches a brow and tilts her head toward the gramophone. “Unless this invitation was for only a short visit?”

He sways to one side and extends his hand to welcome her in with an excess of courteous charm. As though that blatant show of intent was just an ungentlemanly slip in his manners.

She tosses her coat over his head. Punishment for his terrible feigning. “I wonder if a day will come when you simply say ‘Hello, Lucia’.”

“How bored you would be if that day came.” He smooths his hair back with a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

Again his movements ring a bell at the back of her mind. His stride is no different, but there’s something slow and almost careful about the way he sits at the foot of bed. Almost like he’s favoring an injury, only he doesn’t seem to be in any pain. Just the opposite; he’s maybe the most languid she’s ever seen him.

Aside from the way his eyes haven’t left her once.

Melting warmth pools like wax low in her stomach. The brazen intensity would be enough, but there’s a stronger than usual aura of self-satisfied wickedness about him. He has something up his sleeve.

But then, she wouldn’t have answered the call of the music if she weren’t in the mood for a dance. “What brings you to Dumary?”

“Vacation,” he answers innocuously, and noting her skeptical expression, adds: “I do like to get away from time to time.”

“But to come all this long way?” she asks, stepping out of her boots. “Fortuna is much closer.”

“Fortuna has its own share of ghosts.”

So there was something he didn’t want to think about and he had come here, away from literally everything else in his life, to avoid it. A fair reason. The mutual desire to forget difficult things for a little while is how this arrangement was born to begin with. Though, he probably didn’t come all this way just for that. She’d promised him he would have a place here. Though it’s his first time using it, she doesn’t doubt that he thinks of it as his own and came to it the way he would a second home.

Nothing strange about the smile that brings to her face. Why shouldn’t it please her? It’s nice to provide for a friend.

“How is everyone?” The buttons on her sweater loosen with a series of quick pops.

His eyes lazily follow the line of her belt as it pulls away from her hips. “…The same. Nothing has changed.”

“I’m more ready to believe you are not observant,” she laughs, kicking her pants aside. “Even Dumary is different from only a week ago. Little by little and more than you think, everything changes.”

Except for her.

V’s eyes flick up and she might as well be transparent. If only he’d make one of his glib comments so she could just tell him to shut up. It would be easier than standing there mostly undressed while her ears turn hot.

“You will find that I haven’t changed either,” he says too quietly.

From him, the words scorch too much to take any comfort in, much less answer. She retreats instead. Around the bed’s side to turn off the music which suddenly seems too loud but leaves an even worse silence behind in its absence.

There’s a shift behind her. His light-footed steps pad across the softly creaking floor and then he has her by the wrist, guiding her hand up under his sweater. Her fingers spread on their own. Find the jutting angles at his hips. The dip and hollow where his chest gives way to his stomach. The ripples of ribs so close to the surface of his skin, right where they have always been and always will be.

Because he is always in the same state he was born in. _Made_ in.

Just like her.

She sighs. The moment of anxiety has passed, but now she’s embarrassed and has to figure out how to release the awkward thank you backing up in her chest.

V spares her the effort by deciding _now_ is the time for the glib comment. “I’d forgotten you were the sort of clumsy woman who could spoil her own mood.”

She takes a deep breath that does nothing and turns to glare at him, which does even less. Absence does not necessarily make the heart fonder, but it must certainly make the heart lower its standards for her to not throw him out into the snow. “Your mouth will get you in trouble one of these days.”

“Perhaps. Though, as I recall it…” He raises her hand and runs his lips along her fingers. “You find this mouth intriguing.”

He probably can’t remember the name of the street he’s on right now, but of course he remembers that.

The tip of her finger disappears and in the half second of uncertainty about its intended destination she’s not sure what he’s going to do or if she’s turning to stone or to jelly as the prospects multiply in her imagination. Bracing for every possibility leaves her unprepared for reality, and she gives a dry, shuddering gasp as he bites down at the joint just beyond her fingernail.

His eyes watch hers, dark and hooded as he drops back to the bed. Reeling her along by that inch of her finger hooked and growing warm beyond his teeth. She sinks one knee and then the other into the yielding mattress, following him down. Release comes only when he’s entirely beneath her, flat on his back, and he glances aside.

“…You forgot your braid.”

He says it so coolly, but his voice is feather-light. His pulse fluttering at his neck. The rest of the room goes hazy. Even the cold forgotten as fresh heat drums through her.

“So undo it for me.”

Precision covers the ground that haste might in another man. Her hair tie skims across the covers, pauses at their edge, and drops with a jangle that might as well be coming from another universe. This one is occupied fully by the way V’s arm circles her and slides up her back. Tugging her in while his free hand unravels her hair into loose waves across her shoulders and spilling against his face. He doesn’t care. The dance is done, and he pulls at her and breathes her in like he’s trying to drown in her.

Maybe he is. An unmissable hardness fills the absence of space between their bodies. She rolls her hips just to feel him, to hear the way he hisses. While his fingers dig and squeeze at her thighs, she’s already pushing his sweater up toward his collar, following their progress with quick, light bites. The heels of her palms knead at his nipples on the way up, and his entire body arches beneath her, filling every corner of her with luscious static.

She’d been close to forgetting how impossibly heady it was to hunger for someone who was just as starved for her.

The sweater stays bunched up just below his neck. Forgotten in the rush as she slides out of her underwear and up his body in one continuous motion. He knows exactly what to expect, and his exhale sounds almost thankful as her weight settles against his parted, waiting lips.

Yes, oh yes, she is enamored with his mouth, but good gods, what _isn’t_ there to like about it?

If she’s become especially fixated on it, that’s his fault. What else is she supposed to do when she has experienced it in mostly just this one context? Working between her thighs, sucking and spreading and open against her cunt. It feels like she has hours of memories of looking down to see the flat of his tongue curling against her. Of his lips messy and slick and smirking and so unassailably smug about that silver tongue of his.

To actually let on to him though, _merde,_ what had she been thinking? She doesn’t remember. Not then and not when she was sticking her fingers in his mouth either. She’d been tipsy, V was naked, she was wearing (using) a strap-on; a lot of things were happening all at once and it had just seemed reasonable at the time. Like something he would permit. Taunting her so brazenly about it now when he’d made such an unforgettable face…

Wasn’t that his way of saying he’d permit it again?

She almost chokes on her moan, doubling over and reaching one hand out to steady herself on the headboard only to have it splinter in her grip. Oh, no, no, no she can’t just assume that. Permission is rarely linear like with V. It’s more of a lateral dance, easy come and easy go. But that means she can ask, and the thought alone has her dangerously close.

She coils her free hand into his hair, and his eyes flutter open. He’s beautiful between her legs. Flushed. A little out of breath. Less mouthy. Attentive and smoldering and in some way annoyed, as though—oh. Oh, the time it took for her to catch up and to dare has kept him _waiting_.

“Be still,” she rasps eagerly. “And open your mouth.”

It shouldn’t be so different. She always ends up bucking into him and he always accommodates, but the way she lunges against his tongue without interference or assistance is unbelievably different _._

If this slight change in execution is all it takes to for her to find her moans replaced by dazzled silence and to already have her peak encroaching, waltzing down the staircase of her spine, she might never go back. Maybe it’s only because one is so much more debased, because one draws the line so much more cleanly about who is in control but riding his face and fucking his mouth simply cannot be compared. Her fingers splay and grip the back of his head to keep him right there, right there, _right there—_

She shivers up off the bed and almost off his mouth if she were not adamantly pulling him up with her. His fingers scrape against her thighs, her hips, her back, clawing for a way to cling to her churning shape and she swears she hears him give a muffled whine.

It’s unclear to her how long she keeps them suspended like that. Only that at some point she can feel V panting unsteadily against her lower belly, his fingers are still squeezed into her skin. Letting him go is like pulling a pin, and her body eases down with him.

She doesn’t notice when he slips away. He’s gone to catch his breath and wait for her to float back to her body, or at least that’s what her mind automatically fills in. Through her haze, she's cognizant enough to catch the sound of foil tearing and she almost laughs. Maybe he really did come all this way just for this.

The bed creaks. There’s movement and it involves her, in the buoyant, contextless way she might be aware she was moving if she were on a swing with her eyes closed. She’s rolling. Heat flushes against her back, hands graze up her thighs and there’s a testing push—

“Oh, _God-”_

There’s no telling if that was him or her. His voice is a rumble from somewhere above her shoulders and she’s still so dazed with the rush of orgasm that the only thing she can be sure of is his hips flush against the curve of her ass. It seems to have surprised him as much as it did her. Though she’s too overwhelmed to know if she successfully asked a question, she’s aware of herself managing at least an inquisitive hum.

“Relax.” His fingers graze along the curve of her ear, gathering her hair back from her face and the next this she hears is a whisper that makes her entire body sizzle. “You look good like this.”

What a state she must be in for that to actually make her blush. 

As far as she’s concerned, precious little else exists but the red and black tangle of his hair spilling against hers and the pressure of his arm reaching beneath her stomach, his fingers grazing in disconcertingly sedate circles just centimeters away from where they meet and meet and meet again. His tongue traces along the back of her neck and his groans are low and guttural and so, so close that they seem to come from inside her head.

The moment she starts to come back to herself she knows what she must have asked. Or tried to ask. And she asks again. “Let me see you.”

The way his body shudders says he wants to. The way his fingers tighten in the sheets beside her head until his knuckles stand out like bolts. The way his voice goes dizzy and breathless around her name and she adores the way it sounds, the way it tumbles out and his tongue seems to chase after it as if he could somehow stop it or take it back. 

“Not yet.” Throaty and feverish words against her skin. “Not yet—“

Heat builds in the pit of her stomach and the back of her thighs, tingling down the length of her legs to make her toes curl. The pleasure that was overwhelming only moments ago is suddenly not enough. Her back arches, knees shifting and spreading to give her the leverage she needs to meet his thrusts. He gives a strangled cry against her, and she can _hear_ him biting his lip to hold back even there's no part of him that isn't straining toward her. And no part of her that isn’t burning to answer.

“V,” she keens, tilting beneath him. “Let me _see_ you.”

She can’t decide if it’s maddening or kind of cute the way he stops—like a boat that continues to drift while the anchor falls. Slowing first and then pulling back only with an effort that actually draws a low rumble from him.

It shouldn’t be allowed for an unkissed mouth to look as kiss swollen as his. His eyes are lust-dark and betray nothing but that hunger that’s been over him since she arrived. He’s panting softly, and his gaze follows the line of her half-turned body with such obvious need that it sends a shiver through her. She’s only seen him like this once before, under circumstances too different to reconcile.

Not that he gives her much time to think about it before he’s lifting one of her legs up against his chest.

“You asked… So I expect you to keep your eyes on me.”

This is too extraordinary to not pay attention to. She’s not one to keep count, but they’ve met enough times now to be familiar with each other’s’ habits but this is practically new territory yet again. He’s usually more than happy to let _her_ do the work.

Not that she intends to complain.

The heat haze is quick to settle back over her, body and mind. V’s pace is not necessarily vigorous—he doesn’t have an energetic bone in his body even now, and she can’t hate that kind of constancy—but it is relentlesss. A small crease of concentration crosses his brow. Maybe to keep him from downing completely. Keep him present. Enough for his eyes to stay on her. Enough for him to call her attention back where he wants it with taunting bites against her calf every time her head lolls back.

There’s a rumble, and only because of his curious expression does she realize it’s her who is growling, not him. She slides a hand up his chest, over his neck, propping up on an elbow to reach his mouth. He dips his head, and her middle two fingers slide in easily,. His tongue squirms against the backs of her fingers. His lips seal her in, sucking with abandon as they curl in and out in time with his thrusts. When she pulls, he comes along every bit as readily as she had earlier, leaning forward over her, his eyes never leaving hers, and when she can’t help but clench where it is her lips that are around him, the sound he makes is breathy and helpless and needy. He doesn’t bite her fingers. He doesn’t bite it back.

He’d been quiet, once. Composed and almost baleful in sex as he was in a fight and would probably rather have died than let her see him in a truly disheveled state. The one before her now is carelessly unraveling like silk in a blender and knowing they are the same person is far too much for her. 

That urgent prickling rushes over her nerves. Her hand slips from his mouth, up into his hair, and if he minds the mess he doesn’t so much as grimace. Her lashes flutter and it’s hard to keep him in her sight as her head tilts back. Her whole body feels like it’s fizzing, and this is no waltz but a runaway elevator sparking as it crashes through her—

Only to stop with a screech when he does.

A string of her curses leaves her in a snarl that doesn’t seem to end. His fingers are still slowly working her with all the patience every other part of him seems to be without today, but they keep her hovering, rather than push her forward. She’d been so close, and she twists her hips urgently toward him with infuriatingly little return.

_“Putain de bordel de merde!”_

“So impatient.”

“ _Tais-toi!_ ”

"Hm. You know, I thought you'd show more restraint this close to the canal. Not that I mind how sweetly you sing my praises or how enthusiastically you curse my name… but it does make me wonder—”

“Always a sign of **great** things.”

“Is being so noisy another of your kinks?”

"Oh my God, V!” She can’t help but laugh, her frustration far from gone but sidelined for just a moment out of the sheer absurdity, the _audacity_. “No! You're the only one between us who is an exhibitionnnNNNNnn—!"

"Go on, I'm listening," he purrs so sweetly. Like his thumb isn’t pressing mercilessly down against her clit. "What am I?"

She can’t hear herself think over the way her thighs are trembling. Her head snaps back and she feels herself gasp for breath and then there is nothing. White noise and ringing that might or might not be her own breathless scream, barely heard.

The world is soft and drowned out when she comes back to it; reduced to her heart pounding and the spots in her vision dancing in time and the hazy cocoon of pleasure that leaves her warm and unconcerned about how she must look.

"Good answer," says V. 

She laughs again in spite of herself and especially in spite of him. He really is insufferable, but she can’t remember the last time she had so much fun. She smooths her hair and carefully slides her leg off V’s shoulder and back to the bed. He shivers, catching her attention. His face is aloof, but he’s still got that hungry, antsy energy written all over the rest of him.

Her eyes drop, and she blinks stupidly at the sight of his cock still stretching up against his stomach where his pants are undone.. “V, how on earth are you still hard?”

He smirks. “…Do you truly wish to know?”

That’s her out. And she could take it. She’s supposed to be relaxing right now, and there isn’t a single soothing thing about that smirk.

“What did you do?” she groans, already chiding herself for her curiosity.

With not even a hint of shame, he reaches into his pants. There’s a faint sound she doesn’t recognize, and he nonchalantly flicks an unassuming black band onto her stomach. It could’ve been a hair tie, but that’s not what it is at all.

Her ears flush hot, and she grabs a pillow and throws it right in his stupid, grinning face. “ _Salaud_ son of a rat, you were wearing a _ring_ this whole time?!

“ _Padonem,”_ he croons, shaking with barely suppressed laughter.

“You—you _cheat!_ ”

“There’s no cheat.” Damn him, he looks genuinely pleased with himself. “Consider it a debt repaid. For last time.”

From V, that might be sweet and might be petty; time has not made it easier to tell.

Gods, the whole time. He’d been wearing it the whole time, that’s why he was acting like that, why he was _moving_ like that. No wonder he seemed so pent up one moment and so subdued the next. Goddamn him. She goes to toss the other pillow at him just because it’s there, and—

He flinches.

It’s involuntarily, and it passes between them like a stiff breeze. Her arm stops. Lowers back to the bed with the pillow in hand. He tries to ignore it. But the moment he instinctively tries to put distance between them, he has to stifle a grunt. She knows that sound as intimately as she knows the other products of his voice.

Her eyes wander across the room, to where his cane leans between the chair and the radiator.

“ _Se konsa, tandans sa a macho se nan fanmi an, hm…”_

His face scrunches. He can piece together much of what she says in French, but her Creole is a mystery to him if she isn’t apologizing or calling him a bastard.

“Pardon?” he asks warily.

“I said it doesn’t suit you to be _macho,_ ” she half-lies.

For the first time this entire evening, he intentionally looks away from her.

As always, he is a man of opposites. He isn’t vulnerable, and his heart is on his sleeve. He is the least fragile person she has ever met, and the only person she knows who is fragile in all the ways he is. There’s a reason he lets her do the work.

Neither of them changes, but she can at least grow stronger.

The same cannot be said for V.

Her fingers move around his back, gentle on the tensed muscles she finds there, where she knows it must hurt. “Come,” she beckons softly. “Come here.”

If he didn’t ache like she knows he must, he would probably refuse. But she slides back against the headboard and invites him to relax back against her and maybe because they cannot see each other’s faces, he allows himself to ease down with a small sigh of relief.

She can feel all down her chest and stomach that piano-wire tension along his spine. Can see it in the way his fingers clench and unclench restlessly in the sheets.

She remembers their previous meeting with unpleasant clarity. The way he asked if she was the one who was satisfied when he was the one who had opened himself up in so many undoubtedly taxing new ways.

This is not a pattern that only pettiness would produce. She prefers petty. She knows what to do with petty, but not with this. She’s never figured out what to do with _herself_ when she’s in the place he’s in now.

Her movements are slow as she removes the condom. He is overworked and red and strained against his pale stomach, and her touch is gentle.

“You’re too good for your own good,” she murmurs.

A sigh leaves him. She can curse him out next time. Right now she is staring at the aftermath of a ridiculous effort and she can’t find it in her to offer anything but the validation she would want in his position. His head falls back against her shoulder. He looks so placid she almost wants to let him fall asleep. She knows he could, just like this. But he’s been far too good to her. Far too giving.

At some point she hopes he doesn’t have to lace his comforts with things that hurt to make them palatable to him. To make him feel like he earned them. It may not the kind of lesson he can learn from her in these brief periods they spend together, but she’ll try. At the very least, she needs him to understand for her own reasons that he doesn’t have to go so far to spoil or impress her.

Nineteen months is already so incredibly short, so affirming and painless compared to the scarring left by a decade forgotten.

Even if it’s only to ease his loneliness, V doesn’t forget her. Even if it is only to for the chance to be remembered, she ensures there is a place for him. Even these meager promises are an acknowledgment that neither one of them can help but seek out.

“ _Nou tou de fèb konsa, pa vre.._.”

“Mm…?”

That faraway sound is all he can manage. His hips arch languorously, but the stroke of her thumb just under the head of his cock remains slow and steady. Without passion or hunger or haste, but endlessly warm.

She leans her cheek against the damp, cooling strands of his hair. "I said I missed you, _merle_."

His answer is her name, sighed in broken relief as he finally comes.

* * *

The snow is still falling when Lucia wakes.

V is sitting up beside her, reading just the same as she found him. The picture of someone who wouldn’t touch her while she slept, even though her hair is noticeably out of her face for her not having braided it back up. 

She closes her eyes. There's no part of her that isn't pleasantly sore and sated and she's sure that was his intent. An offering of affection he didn't know what else to do with, or how else to express. But now it’s morning. They're still in the same bed, but the distance between them is widening by the moment. The safe, necessary distance that lets them pretend nothing’s any different than when they started.

A radiator knocks from the floor below, and the one across the room answers a few moments later. 

"I believe I interrupted your patrol." 

His voice is hushed. Careful. Pointed away from any identifiable emotion the same way his gaze is pointed away from her.

 _'I think I'll stay this time'._ It would be so simple to say.

“In a bit,” she says instead, rolling half out of the bed to reach for the gramophone. “It’s been a long time since I heard this record.”

“Did you leave it here the whole time?”

“Since you were last here.”

“…Isn’t it your favorite?”

“It is.”

_The turn in the weather_

_Will keep us together_

_So I can honestly say_

_That as far as I'm concerned, it's a lovely day_

His fingers fidget with the edge of the page. “I… I see.”

For all his charming sighs for her to stay in his half-asleep stupor last time, he has no actual idea what to do with her or himself now that she’s actually lingering. It’s so like him she nearly laughs.

She curls back into the blankets and hides her smirk in the pillow while the music enfolds them. Her favorite songs, the ones she left behind because she missed his company as soon as it was gone, and in some silly way, she had hoped he would hear it and remember her enough to miss her too. There's no real reason to stay and listen to them now, and he probably knows.

For as long as he's on Dumary, she's sure she'll hear this music again, playing in the evenings when it's quiet on the canal.


End file.
